* Pascal Stumpf <[email protected]> [2011-11-20 01:25]: > I think what Marc meant is that whatis.db/mandoc.db should be in the > same directory as their corresponding manpages.
i think you're reading that into his words, his point (rightly) was a file per dir (wherever that file actually lives) vs one global file. > And I agree on that > point, especially in the case of NFS-mounted /usr: One shouldn't have to > run mandocdb to be able to run apropos(1) for the pages on the remote > machine. And even worse, what happens if the remote machine is updated > or packages are added? The client in such a setup will have an outdated > database without being aware of it. given that these files are rebuilt periodically i think that is the much smaller drawback compared to writing to /usr. i've run into this before several times on CF-based systems with ro /usr, and this is the only offender i ever noticed. > mandoc.db should be in the same directory as the manpages it was > generated from, and need not be writable by machines that don't have > write access to the pages themselves. i think you are overly optimistic on these. the files get rebuilt periodically for a reason - if they were reliably updated every time an new manpage shows up somewhere in the configured pathes that wouldn't be needed. admittedly these days with everybody using packages and pkg_add doing the right thing (afair at least), and people building from src beng dismissed anyway :), we're much closer to that optimum than ever before. > With respect to the weekly makewhatis, I think that's a bug in the > weekly(8) script: It should not blindly assume that every database > listed in man.conf(5) is on a writable filesystem. that I agree with completely. -- Henning Brauer, [email protected], [email protected] BS Web Services, http://bsws.de, Full-Service ISP Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services. Dedicated Servers, Root to Fully Managed Henning Brauer Consulting, http://henningbrauer.com/
